


Into Pale Slumber

by Bluecoeur (vietbluefic)



Category: League of Legends
Genre: Alune-centric, Aphelios Is Doing His Best, Aphelios-centric, Blood and Injury, Brother-Sister Relationships, Canon Compliant, Canon Universe, Character Death, Dark, Death, Deathfic, Emotional Hurt, Family Loss, Gen, Heavy Angst, Hurt No Comfort, Kindred-centric, Magic, Major Character Injury, Meeting Death, Moon, One Shot, Pain, Personification of Death, Platonic Relationships, Protective Alune, Sad, Sad Ending, Sibling Love, Siblings, Tragedy, Twins
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-03-15
Updated: 2020-03-15
Packaged: 2021-02-28 22:07:24
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,103
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23154541
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/vietbluefic/pseuds/Bluecoeur
Summary: "They know we'll come.""Yet they are never prepared."(Or;After a battle goes wrong, Alune holds onto her brother for as long as she can, before the Kindred come to take him.)
Relationships: Alune & Aphelios (League of Legends), Lamb & Wolf (League of Legends)
Comments: 11
Kudos: 67





	Into Pale Slumber

**Author's Note:**

> I...didn't expect this to turn out the way it did. I started off trying to write something exploring a potential dynamic between Aphelios and Kindred, perhaps based on the fact that the guy would surely skirt around death a lot with continuous, ritualistic self-poisoning. I'll probably finish that too, but this sprung from that fairly organically, plus I wanted to write something in Alune's voice.
> 
> I like their sibling relationship very much... Tragic, but loving and protective still. So of course my brain was like, "Would sure be a shame if something happened uwu."
> 
> Heavily inspired/based on [this piece of gorgeous fanart](https://twitter.com/DAWNlingchen/status/1224950736871542784) by [DAWN凌晨](https://twitter.com/DAWNlingchen/status/1224950736871542784). Thanks for the pain, friend. _[tips hat]_

It happened so quick.

One moment, Alune was with her brother, seeing through his ephemeral eyes. Veins aflame with adrenaline of her own, taking and shoving weapon after mystical weapon into his waiting hands—

And the next, she was alone.

Alune gasped aloud, and the air of the fortress was cold and damp in her mouth. The silence within was stark, especially compared to the shouts and gunfire and singing knives that had been the battle-scene her brother had been locked in. “What?” she whispered, shocked, and the stones caught her voice. _What, what, what,_ they echoed back, taunting her bewilderment. Marus Omegnum was enigmatic at the best of times, and cruel at the worst.

_Aphelios. What happened to Aphelios?!_

Pale, Alune raised her hands hastily and tried to reach out again.

He was not there.

Terrified now, Alune gathered the welling moonlight within herself and shoved outwards. Extending her hands out from the Veil, groping around for him desperately, until…

There. There he was: the thread of him, made visible by the white-hot burn of the noctum in him. Thin and barely visible — but there. Just enough.

She latched onto the scalding heat of the noctum and leapt back into their connection.

Only to then cry out.

“Phel!”

As if his skin was hers, as if his blood was hers: she felt cold everywhere. Pain _everywhere._ Aphelios was looking down at his belly, his hands clasped over his abdomen as if to keep it together — and when the moon above him slid forward from a cover of cloud, and Alune caught a better glimpse, she couldn’t stop the sob that escaped her.

No, no, _nonono._

A warrior with an engraved blade lay dead by Aphelios’s feet, a bullet wound scorched through his head. Slowly, slowly, Aphelios crouched to sit, and blood leached out between his fingers.

She felt him echo her name, wordless and somber, and scrambled to her feet.

“Phel, be still!” she cried. The wound looked horrible, _horrible._ Worse still — what edges of skin she could see between Aphelios’s darkening hands appeared to be bruise-purple, as though seeped with ink. She felt its malicious presence inside Aphelios’s skin. _Poison._ A foreign one, different from the ceremonial noctum. The distilled venom of an unnameable serpent, apparently — because when she stretched out her magic towards it, the poison reared a fanged head and hissed malevolently. Aphelios groaned, and like a phantom sweet, she tasted the distinct tang of blood in her own mouth.

“It fights me,” she whispered. “If I try to purge it, it will kill you.”

Dimly, Aphelios nodded. Her presence alone made the venom twist and thrash within his blood. Alune saw how Aphelios clenched his arms stiff, how tension drew his shoulders taut and beaded sweat down his temples. He couldn’t feel the pain; the noctum prevented that. But she knew he could perceive the churning course of his blood, the hot pressure against his hands, and the _wrongness of it all._

“It’s going to be all right,” Alune reassured. Again, her brother nodded. All around him were trees and shadows and the high, shimmery grass of a meadow. Under the bright silver of the moon, they looked very beautiful indeed. “I’m— I’m going to try now, okay? Please don’t…”

 _Don’t die,_ but she bit her tongue. Aphelios breathed deep, though, as if he understood. Wavering along the sorcerous connection, she received from her twin his uncertainty, his pain, the deep-deep-down tinges of his fear. And his solid, undying trust.

The echo in her head had a low, kind voice. Alune, it said. Alune, don’t be scared. You can do this. Don’t be scared.

“I’m not,” Alune whispered. “I’m not. Here goes.”

At first, it seemed like it could be done, actually. Aphelios’s steady pulse kept the poison relatively at bay, and Alune approached it with caution so as to better coax it towards the surface. In the cold confines of the fortress she focused, palms stretched outwards. Her magic swelled until full and whole as the moon, then honed onto the thing in her brother’s veins, illuminative as a beacon.

Then she brushed against it, and immediately shuddered, and wished so very, very badly that she hadn’t.

 _O, Mother Moon._ What a horrible, insatiable creation. Constructed for torture, to inflict a slow and spiraling death, it was a half-magic thing that _rotted_ the afflicted from the inside-out. Alune felt dread creep up her throat, colder than bile. She had to force her hands down so she wouldn’t burn the thing alive. Burn her brother, too, in the process.

“It’s going to be all right,” Alune repeated. Aphelios didn’t respond this time. She hastily checked and he was gazing dully at the horizon. Stars dotted the night sky, innumerable, softest blue. The ground under his legs was cold and dusty. His blood soaked it muddy.

“Phel?” she called to him from across the cosmos. “Are you… How are you feeling?”

Music, came his voice — faint as a forgotten memory, or a dream. Someone is singing. I am listening.

“Music?” Alune started. She could hear nothing through his ears but the whistle of wind and cricket-song. Chills began to worm down her spine. “Aphelios, what— I-I don’t hear it. What… What does it sound like?

Like the gentle darkness at moonrise. She pushed the Veil wider and his thoughts arrived scattered and meandering, harder for her to pull together. Her fear deepened. Like the games we’d play as children. Like hearing your voice, and suddenly remembering what you look like. Like feeling my head on the grass, like resting after a long, endless fight. I’m tired, I’m tired…

“Phel,” Alune said and her voice quavered, terrified. “Phel, close your eyes, _close your eyes._ ”

At once, the horizon and stars and blood-soaked ground all went black. He obeyed; he trusted her guidance so. Alune sobbed as she forced her way through the Veil and again had to fight to find him. The noctum— It was trickling out of his system, pushed by viper-venom and blood loss alike. It was fading. Their connection was fading. _He was fading._

“No,” she cried. “No, no! You can’t— You can’t take him!”

And then.

And then.

Despite the darkness of Aphelios’s closed eyes—

Despite the solitude of the temple here—

She felt them there.

_She felt them here, too._

The Lunari had their own teachings about these two. Even had their own names: _Tas_ and _Ur._ “Cut” and “rip.” For their gentleness — or utter lack thereof.

Everyone knew it would be too late for whosoever looked upon the masks of the Kindred. Aphelios had already shut his eyes. Still, Alune tried to clasp her hands over his brow, draw him closer to her chest. Hide him from their gazes. Protect him.

(She couldn’t, of course. The distance between them was nothing and everything both at once.)

_“All things are ours to take, dear child,”_ said the Lamb.

Oh, oh. Her voice was as tender as it was frigid-cold.

“ _No,_ ” Alune said through gritted teeth. She squeezed her eyes shut, clutched at Aphelios’s spirit-form despite feeling nothing underhand. “No no no. Not him. He’s my brother. Not him!”

 _“We have taken brothers from sisters before, and sisters from brothers,”_ the Lamb replied, dispassionate. _“Parents from child, and child from parents. All go, in their due time.”_

“But it is not his time!”

Even through the Veil, Aphelios felt so still. Alune pressed her hands to where she had seen that awful death-wound and sent up a frantic half-prayer.

“Please. Not yet! I can— I can get it out of him. I can save him still. Please, let me help him!”

A warped, guttural laugh tore the darkness behind her eyelids. She sensed the night air above Aphelios cower — felt the stones in the temple grow older still. Her pale hair blew back, blasted by the heated breath of the Wolf.

_“Pleas bore me! Let him struggle. Let him gasp and choke and flee! Pain makes for good hunts!”_

_“No, Wolf. She mourns…though this is but natural. Look, child. He drifts to sleep. I would only make his sleep complete.”_

Alune was crying in earnest now. When had that begun? Aphelios had always been a quiet boy — but never had he been truly silent. Not like _this._ Desperate, horrified, she snapped forward and could only relent when she felt him: a trickle of ragged breath. Ragged consciousness. His awareness of her flickered, like the edges of a woken dream.

The viper coiled in his throat. If she tried anything now, she’d snuff out her own brother with it.

“I beg you…”

Alune held out her hand, reached towards the heat and cold of the Kindred, and begged.

“We’ve always been together. We were born, and raised, and…and he needs me. _He needs me._ He’d be so lost without me there with him. His…His name is Aphelios, he is my twin…!”

 _“We know his name, child,”_ said Lamb, _“just as we know yours. Even the tracks of the moon-children we have followed, ever close behind.”_

Wolf cackled and snapped his huge, tree-branch fangs. _“Alune! Alune! Give me your brother. I will chase him until he can run no more. Then I will crack him between my teeth, and know how he tastes!”_

 _“I will show him the places where moonlight shines eternal,”_ recited Lamb like a poem. _“I will fell him gently, and he will be as a feather on unbroken snow…”_

Tears dripped from Alune’s chin, onto Aphelios’s hair (into her empty lap). She whispered, “Have mercy. I’ve never truly left him. We have never been apart. Don’t you understand?”

_“We don’t!”_

_“We do.”_

The smell of snow stung, and the sinew in Lamb’s bowstring was fresh-torn.

_“But all whole things break…and all halves, separate. The only thing that can never be taken apart—”_

_“—is_ us _.”_

“Then…”

Alune tipped her face up, until the space behind her eyelids tinged blue, and she knew the moon was looking upon her.

“Then take me with him.”

 _“Gladly!”_ Wolf snarled his laughter and then Alune bit back a scream. Because all of a sudden the Wolf himself was _here,_ as all the shadows that filled the sanctuary’s corners, and his fangs were spears in her face, slavering and eager. _“Lamb, I hear her heart race! I would play the chasing game and make it burst! I would pounce on her, and bite it to bits!”_

_“Perhaps someday, Wolf. But not today.”_

Alune felt the thread that was Aphelios convulse. Frightened by the violence of the fit, she placed her hands on what was left of him, then bowed low and wept as blood streamed from his mouth and nostrils into his coat collar. The viper had begun to tear at his insides. The veins emptied of noctum threatened to soon fill with incomparable agony. She didn’t want that. She didn’t want him to die suffering. _She didn’t want him to die at all._

Lamb began, _“I would tell you to choose, child—”_

 _“—except it wouldn’t really matter,”_ finished Wolf.

“Phel.” Alune pushed through the Veil tentatively. “Phel…can you hear me…? I’m with you, brother. I’m still with you.”

Silence, at first. Then, so very faintly:

I feel so alone. Where are you?

_“I am here, Aphelios.”_

The Lamb’s voice was soft. Ash and wool and snow. Alune held her breath and felt a ripple from her brother, muddled pain and confusion.

You’re near. But you’ve been so far. How?

_“I have always been here.”_

I feel so cold…

_“You will be colder still, but only for a moment.”_

More silence. This time, it stretched for so long that Alune began to fear he’d gone already. But then the thinned-out connection tremored, and she recognized the sensation with a fresh torrent of tears. He was reaching. For her. A formless question, so weak as he lay dying. Aphelios was trying to make sure.

She wondered, for just a moment, what would happen if she told him the truth.

But it lasted for just a moment.

“Yes,” she whispered, and her voice cracked down the middle with grief. “It’s me. Come— Come with me, Aphelios.”

Realms away, worlds and eons and a million different moons away— She felt him relax. A long, slow breath curled from his lungs while a pale figure stood over him, and a bowstring notched.

“Please,” she tried. One last time. “Please.”

Alune held out her hands, right before the arrow released.

But she was not truly there.

So, the arrow went right through her, and left behind a coldness like snow.

**Author's Note:**

> The Lunari names for Lamb and Wolf are derived from the Mongolian words for "cut" (таслах _taslakh_ ) and "rip" (урах _urakh_ ).
> 
> As always, thank you for reading. <3 ily guys and i promise i love phel too please don't kill me hgkld;sahgsdG;LKDSAGDS
> 
> [❁ follow me on Twitter!](https://twitter.com/vietbluecoeur)


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